Listhings blog

2011-09-19

Important information regarding guest usage

Starting from October 10, 2011, Listhings application will no longer be available for guests (i.e. those using Listhings without a password). If you are using Listhings as a guest, you need to create yourself an account. Upon creating yourself an account, all your notes that you have stored on the Listhings page will be transferred to your newly created account.

It’s absolutely free. Besides, you will also have other benefits of being a registered user - such as accessing your notes from other computers (using your email and password to sign in) and multiple canvases.

So, if this concerns you, please sign up as registered user before October 10, 2011. It only takes 30 seconds.

The reason I am asking you to do this is that I am planning some great updates to Listhings - some which could not work with unauthorized users. Also, using Listhings without a password proved to be less secure than I realized.

If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to email me at martin@listhings.com.

Thanks!

2011-04-11

Listhings on iPad

Yesterday Listhings switched servers. That went really well. Now I can share some more good news with you.

Listhings is now a bunch of steps more compatible with the iPad. You can pan around the canvases, drag notes around and edit them. While some details (resizing sticky notes horizontally, for example) do not work yet and there might be some small quirks here and there, the overall experience is now much, much smoother.

Oh, and did I mention that real-time sharing works across all platforms? That is, whenever someone updates notes on a canvas from a regular computer, all folks using iPads will see these changes instantly, in real-time, and vice versa.

How to use Listhings on iPad?

Simply open up your web browser
Navigate to Listhings.com
Click the arrow button next to address bar
Choose Add it Home Screen, like this:

2011-04-10

Switching servers

Folks, I’ve finally got some good news for you on stability. I took some time and re-wrote some of the hazy parts of Listhings core code that dealt with real-time communication and sharing. I know, I know, I was super-excited too when I got it all running last year using a technology called APE. The thing is, time has moved on and newer, much more reliable technologies have surfaced. So, I re-engineered most of the hazy parts now to newer technologies, such as Socket.IO (and WebSockets, eventually, which will hopefully make its major come-back soon). But that’s just one part of the good news.

The other part is that we are currently switching our servers. This process should finish within the next few hours. You should not notice the transition in any way, actually. All your notes will be there and you should be able to log in again in a few hours time.

“What’s in it for me?” you might want to ask. What you will get out of this is more stable and reliable service that does not go down daily.

I hope I’ll have some more good news for you soon enough :) Stay tuned.

2010-11-23

Hey, it’s been months. What’s up?

Indeed, it’s been a few months of silence from me here. Let me fix this right now.

So, what’s cooking?

First, Listhings now has over 10,000 users. It happened rather quietly just a few days ago and Listhings now indeed has over ten thousand registerd users. Many donations have been made to support the development as well and I’m very thankful to all those who have done so. Have you donated already?

And second, a new version is in the works. I’ve been tinkering around with different frameworks and APIs such as Recess, CodeIgniter, Kohana and others. (These are web application development frameworks, for those who don’t know). A few months ago I settled on a decent one to base the new version of Listhings on. The new version will include a bunch of new features (one which I can shout out right now is rich text editing but there’ll be a lot more) and improvements on the stability and overall look and feel. I am pretty confident the new version will be released still within this year, 2010.

Now, speaking of stability… some of you might have noticed the frequent 3-5 minute downtimes Listhings has from time to time. I am doing all I can to avoid these but I can’t promise there will be no more such short downtimes until the release of the next version. Starting from the next version, there should be no more such short outages as I am planning to deploy the application into different set-up. On the scale of percentages by the way, the uptime of Listhings services has been around 97% over the last few weeks. This should significantly increase after the next release.

You might also want to ask “Why are these downtimes happening?” Well, it appears even though I am renting a virtual private server for Listhings, I still have to deal with something the hosting provider calls “extensive use”. They seem to have a mechanism in place that blocks the entire site for a few minutes in case it thinks the traffic gets too high (even though I stay within the limits of the virtual server) It’s pretty sad, I know, and I’ve optimized the site every possible way to avoid such blocks. Eventually the new version will be deployed into a completely different server set-up so such errors should be gone for good after the release.

2010-07-21

In this video, published a few weeks ago, Bob Gower from bobcanhelp.com shows how he uses Listhings. Bob Gower is a guy who works with managers and executives at medium-sized software companies to recude their problems delivering software predictably on tight time-lines.

2010-04-18

I’m experimenting with note titles at Listhings. I often use Listhings to store recipes I like. It’s almost always the case where your notes end up with a title on the first line, followed by some content. This is especially the case with recipes. I’ve now tuned Listhings to highlight the first line on notes if the note has more than one line of content. I think it makes sense and provides a good visual way to find what you’re looking for.

What do you think?

You can now share canvases with multiple people more easily. You can add multiple email addresses for sharing, separated with a… guess what? commas or semicolons!

Start sharing

Lost your password?

Just launched the new password reminder tool at Listhings. It uses true random passwords generated by atmospheric noise, with a help of a service called passwd.me.

So in case your password at Listhings is forgotten, come ask for a new one - we’ll literally give you a new password from the skies :)

2010-02-25

A very nice Spanish video tutorial on how to use Listhings. (Muy buen tutorial video en español sobre cómo utilizar Listhings.)

2010-02-19

A complete re-install of web server

I was wrong about the end of nightly downtimes, and I’m sorry. In fact, the situation got somewhat worse tonight. At around 3 AM (GMT time), the web server log script failed to start up the proxy web server - the same error that had been haunting me previously as well. I was able to get the server back up and running around 6 AM (GMT time).

Obviously I had had enough of these errors already. Thus I decided to take down the whole main web server for a complete re-install to get rid of these errors once and for all. It took me and DreamHost (they were a huge help for me, thanks folks!) a little over an hour to get it back up and running. The server is now lean and clean, running in a complete fresh environment.

All Listhings services are now operating normally, and I will be keeping a very close eye on the web server during the next days to make sure nothing like this would occur again!

Update: even though there have been downtimes, I would like to point out that these downtimes did not pose any risk whatsoever to your notes at Listhings. All your data is safe, and backed up.

Listhings